Caroline Meeber, C'est Moi

By Martha Duffy

HOMAGE TO THEODORE DREISER by Robert Penn Warren. 173 pages. Random House. $5.95.

Theodore Dreiser was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, one hundred years ago. It would not seem like one of the more prominent centennials. With the exception of An American Tragedy and Sister Carrie, his doorstopper novels are largely forgotten.

Under the circumstances, Robert Penn Warren's essay comes as a surprise. It is not an attempt to "rehabilitate" Dreiser, but a wise and rather grandly plain utterance by a compassionate critic who has evidently had Dreiser on the back of his mind for many years. Besides, the two men have something in common. Though Warren is a scholar and a fine poet, and Dreiser was far from being either, Warren's novels are easily as unfashionable as Dreiser's, and they are not as good.. He thus comes to his subject with a veteran aspirant's affectionate respect--rather like Mailer writing on Floyd Patterson.

Not that Warren whitewashes or minces words. Dreiser never got any education, moral or intellectual, to speak of. He was one of ten children of a luckless, feckless father and a mother whom he once described as "beyond or behind good or evil." Arriving as a young man in the booming, brutal Chicago of the 1890s, he fell in love with the city and became a reporter, though Warren notes that "he was barely literate and a born liar." He began his first novel, Sister Carrie, on a dare, by writing the name on the top of a blank page and proceeding without design to fill 500 more about an amorphous, ambitious country girl called Caroline Meeber. Dreiser described Carrie as a "little soldier of fortune," and as Warren dryly observes, he might have added, echoing Flaubert, "Caroline Meeber, c'est moi."

Teddy Bears. Though Dreiser later raged intermittently at robber barons, "his artistic ambition was painfully intermingled with his ambition for money and fine clothes; he often saw his work as a mere instrument to satisfy his grossest aspirations." He would stop at nothing. In one opulent period at Butterick's magazines--which sold dress patterns the way Michelin Guides sell tires--he waged a campaign against Teddy bears because they did not require dolls' clothing.

Though other American writers, like Herman Melville and Mark Twain, had been born poor, Dreiser was perhaps the first total outsider, one who did not feel he had inherited either a culture or its caveats. When he entered the new, rapacious urban world, what he saw was not the collapse of a genteel tradition but the "tall walls" that he and countless immigrants' sons would try to scale. What shocked people about Sister Carrie was not her loose morals but Dreiser's indifference to them, "the implication that vice and virtue might be mere accidents."

His trilogy (The Financier, The Titan, The Stoic) is based on the roller-coaster career of the glamorous financial manipulator, Charles Tyson Yerkes. As Warren reluctantly notes, the books are "crudely written and dramatically unrealized." But he goes on to chide himself for perhaps judging them by irrelevant standards. Like Frank Norris (McTeague), Dreiser was determined to present an unretouched picture of the materialistic, socially fluid America they both knew.

In Greenwich Village during World War I, Dreiser immersed himself in Marxism and psychoanalysis, both of which found their way into his best work, An American Tragedy. Understandably, his intellectual friends considered him a child. They were perplexed by "a man who automatically absorbed ideas into his bloodstream, not concerned with consistency but with how an idea 'felt.' "

In the end, Warren finds that what Dreiser arouses in him is not admiration for the books as much as a peculiar "commitment" to the author. In one of three poems that begin the book. Warren does his best to make precise an elusive creative debt:

He will enter upon his reality: but enters only inTo your gut, or your head or your heart, to enhouse there and stay, And in that hot darkness lie lolling and swell--like a tumor, perhaps benign.

May I present Mr. Dreiser? He will write a great novel, someday.

Martha Duffy

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